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RE: Don't Get Carried Away
The corn we eat (colloquially referred to as "sweet corn") is different from "field corn", and you are right that it is used for animal feed. However, it is also used for human consumption as corn sweetener, corn starch, corn meal (like in tortillas), etc.
Yeah, meat prices are pretty high. However, to this point I really have a tough time getting excited about this. The farmers get a tiny fraction of the money from the food you buy and now that the raw material is more valuable, they are getting more of the proceeds. I really haven't heard anything quantifiable about how this is adversely affecting the poor in the US (many of whom get food stamps), but I had seen an article about how this is driving up food prices in Mexico beyond the reach of some of their people who buy the corn to make tortillas. That said, there is a lot of room for improvement in agricultural practices worldwide, and rising food prices would be a good incentive for them to make those reforms rather than the system of perpetual protectionist systems that encourage inefficiency.
All of that is beside the point anyway because clearly we want to move on to cellulostic ethanol (or I would like to jump straight to cellulostic BUTANOL) and bio-diesel.
I'm not totally certain that CRP is connected with ethanol or wetlands. There was a lot of land set fallow to artificially reduce production and allow the land to recover, but some states also had a separate wetland recovery program. On that point I wholly agree.
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RE: Don't Get Carried Away
Even if Dr. Patzeks' numbers are off, a side effect of corn-based ethanol is the increase in cost. As a pure food crop, the cost of a dozen ears of corn this year at a non-Amish/Mennonite markets in my area was (on average) around $4.50-5.00. That's at least a full $2.00 over last year. Amish/Mennonite corn prices didn't change. I asked one of the farmers, and he said that he put most of his crop up for Ethanol and had less corn to sell, so he had to raise prices to compensate. Corn grown for Ethanol, it turns out, isn't the same corn you and I eat--it's the corn that chickens, cows, etc. eat. Did you happen to notice the meat prices?
The worse side effect of all in the Ethanol 'boom' is the reduction of land in the CRP program. This directly affects the land available for wetlands, etc., which has been an unexpected benefit of the CRP program. Iowa can directly trace the recovery of native brook and brown trout to the amount of CRP land in existence. As it happens, their brook trout are genetically distinct from others in the US, making them more valued. I'm sure other states such as my own PA can trace their wild trout recovery (at least in part) to the CRP program.
Couple all of this with the subsidies that are being received by ethanol growers, and frankly the Ethanol boom is a true bust. We would be better off focusing on methods such as the algae farming mentioned earlier that do not impact the environment like Ethanol does.. We could even use rooftops of shopping malls for that program, and not need to remove land from the CRP program.
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